A DEM study on the thermal conduction of granular material in a rotating drum using polyhedral particles on GPUs

A number of industrial applications require the control of granular material temperature across individ-ual grains. Particle level simulations using the DEM is thus critical for optimization. However due to com-putational cost, particle shape in DEM is often omitted. In this paper advances in GPU computing via the Blaze-DEM code is used to study the effect of particle shape on heat transfer in a rotating drum. Shape irregularity was found to have the greatest effect with non-symmetric shapes having a better heat con-duction of at-least 30%. A linear trend of system temperature as function of both RPM and fill level was found. In all cases temperature increased sub-linearly over time. All shapes where found to be sensitive to particle size increases larger than 1.5x. Finally significant diffusion of particles in the axial direction demonstrated the importance of considering the full domain rather than a slice to limit computational cost. (c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper utilizes the advances in GPU computing via the Blaze-DEM code to study the effect of particle shape on heat transfer in a rotating drum. The results show that shape irregularity has the greatest impact on heat conduction, with non-symmetric shapes exhibiting better heat transfer performance. Furthermore, there is a linear trend of system temperature with both RPM and fill level.